


The Universal Constant

by PinkLetterDay



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Confrontations, Death, Disscussion of intimate partner violence, Dubious Science, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Not junkier science than the show tho, Wrongful Imprisonment, bereavement, pre-series AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-07
Updated: 2018-05-07
Packaged: 2019-05-03 13:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14569797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PinkLetterDay/pseuds/PinkLetterDay
Summary: When Henry Allen dies in prison, Joe attempts to comfort his surrogate son. He is unprepared for Barry's hard truths.In a multiversity of variables, certain things remain immutable.





	The Universal Constant

**Author's Note:**

> One author’s determination to shove the Savitar storyline and its assassination of Barry Allen's fundamental identity where the sun don’t shine, thanxkbai.

To say Henry Allen’s funeral had been sparsely attended would have been to understate the case. His friends and family had all cut ties with him over the decade he had spent in prison, so that when the casket was lowered to the ground, only his son stood over it, flanked by Joe and Iris in silent support.

(Joe would later discover that Henry’s cellmate had appealed for furlough to attend the funeral but had been denied.)

Barry had walked through the entire affair as though in a dream. He had stood at a remove from the proceedings, staring sightlessly out into the sea of headstones dotting the green through the pastor’s generic eulogy and then at the dirt trailing through his fingers as though analyzing the soil composition, ignoring the coffin it fell upon. The only point he had been adamant about when Joe and Iris had handled the arrangements was that his father be laid to rest beside his mother. They had expected nothing less, even though Joe knew Chyre and a few others in the force thought it perverse that the man be buried beside the woman he had murdered.

He had been equally adamant on not having a wake (“Why? Who else is mourning him?”) so when the pastor had taken his leave, Joe turned around to find his fosterling missing.

Barry would need space right then, Joe knew, but he was also worried about what he might take it into his head to do if he was left alone. Joe had despised Henry Allen since he had first drawn back the plastic sheet over his wife’s face to shield the young shell-shocked eyes of their son, but the man’s death could not have come at a worse time for Barry. He was almost done with his CCPD internship, so close to graduating and joining the force with Joe where he could keep him close but behind the scenes. Where he could slowly experience for himself the inevitability of the evidence that condemned his father and finally move on with his life.

Instead, Henry Allen had died protecting another prisoner in a riot and martyred himself forever in Barry’s eyes.

Despite all the interactions between father and son giving every appearance of selfless devotion, Joe had never been able to figure out whether Henry really had loved his child as much as he seemed (hadn't he also seemed a devoted husband till he murdered his wife?). But now the point was moot, as he had died letting his son believe the lie of his innocence. Whether Henry had intended it or not, it was the worst kind of cruelty to the boy, and Joe feared, that Barry’s obsession with proving the impossible would now carry him further adrift than he or Iris could ever reach him.

He finally found Barry sitting in the second pew inside the empty chapel. His back was still held in that unnaturally ramrod line, staring at the kaleiscopic pattern the afternoon light cast on the limestone floor as it filtered in through the stained glass window. A sunbeam from another overhead arch slanted over his head, illuminating the dust motes dancing around him, bringing out the mahogany burnish of his hair. Taking in his pale composure, tie loosened under his Adam’s apple and blazer outlining the breadth of his sloping shoulders, Joe could still only see the little boy of ten years agone, uncomfortable as a penguin in his starched Sunday suit, holding his and Iris’s fingers in a death grip in front of his mother’s coffin, a small, terrified but brave David facing his own Goliath of tragedy.

Joe shuffled himself over next to him, the honeyed oak seat sliding solid and polished beneath him despite the clear scuffings of age. Barry’s hands rested on the back of the pew in front, fingers unfurled to as if to catch the light on each tip. Joe didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing and simply sat, the ache in his heart heavy with the storm he could sense within Barry’s.

“Do you know who I love most in the world, Joe?”

 _Iris_. He had always known that. He suspected most people who knew Barry knew that; those expressive eyes always so unknowingly worshipful of her since they were kids.

Still, he wasn’t sure he was supposed to know, so he stayed silent.

“It’s Iris,” said Barry. “Always has been. She’s - she means everything to me.”

Joe nodded cautiously, wondering whether Barry meant him to interpret this as a platonic love or if it was a tacit confession.

“Do you ever wonder about the inconsistencies in my mother’s case?”

Joe blinked, unprepared. Then sighed deeply.

“Barry, your father was found-”

“Over her body with the knife in his hand, no sign of break in, yeah I know. But what about the autopsy report?”

_Blade thrust diagonally through the 2nd rib, two inches to the right of the heart, penetrating the upper ventricle and top of the left lung. Embedded three inches deep, stoppering blood flow without immediately rupturing the organs. Impact has failed to shatter rib but penetrated cleanly without laceration. Slow haemorrage took approximately three minutes, victim likely in shock but maintaining blood pressure for approx 60 seconds before bleeding out. Cause of death: aortic rupture_

“It was a deep stab wound.”

“Yes it was,” said Barry, distant yet conversational. “It was just a paring knife, not a meat cleaver or fish knife. She was cutting an apple. The blade was slightly curved, the sharpest edge along the side and not the point. It would have needed a huge amount of force just to drive it into three inches of muscle….but it also went through bone.”

“The bone should have slowed the knife’s downward thrust, but it didn’t. He had to have pinned her down and held it right over her head while she was looking up at him. And then, instead of jamming it into the join between her neck and shoulder - the most vulnerable place she had from that angle - he drove it into her heart…and missed.”

Joe tried not to cringe at the dispassionate way Barry rattled off the facts. It was a testament to how long the kid had been analyzing every gruesome detail inside his head until the most traumatic event of this life was nothing more than a breakdown of physics and anatomy, detached yet frustrating as constantly fiddling with an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube.

“My father was a surgeon, Joe. He knew exactly where the ribs are in a body. Why would he miss the heart and try to go  _through_  a rib instead of over or under?”

The old fatigue sank like a stone inside him as his breath escaped in an even deeper sigh. He had tolerated and fielded a barrage of questions like this for years after Barry had come to live with them, usually culminating in Joe sharply ordering him to his room or Barry storming off in tears. But after that last terrible fight during his senior year of high school, the boy had finally realized the threshold of Joe’s patience and the cross examinations had stopped. Something had broken between them in the aftermath, some strand of hope and trust forever retracted from Barry. Joe had balanced out his irrational guilt with the sheer relief at the tenuous peace he thought they had forged - till now.

“Barry, stabbings are usually not premediated,” he said, dusting off the same old, well-worn arguments in resignation. “In the heat of the moment, people forget who they are, much less their training.”

Barry nodded complacently. “Yes. It must have been the heat of the moment. No one ever saw them fight before it happened, did they? My Dad’s lawyer tried to use that. Usually before a crime of passion happens there’s some sort of tension, some background that leads up to it. But no one ever thought my Dad had anything but love for Mom, and there was never any evidence of money disputes or cheating. Heat of the moment…with no fire.”

 _But you can never know what happens behind closed doors,_ thought Joe.  _Sometimes our own love takes terrible faces, especially when betrayed._

“But you can never really know someone, can you Joe?” said Barry as though he had read Joe’s mind. He examined the texture of the aged oak pew under his hands with distant interest, fingertips trailing lightly over the slight cracks and grooves. “You only assume that you know them until you don’t, isnt that what you always say?”

“Everyone assumed my Dad loved my Mom till they assumed he drove her to her knees, braced her shoulder with one hand, and plunged a fucking paring knife into her chest, somehow passing through bone without crushing it. That should be impossible, Joe. _There were no lacerations_.That bit confused the fuck out of three separate medical examiners and what the defence lawyer tried to get to stick before the judge decided that the knife being the murder weapon was enough. He was precise and powerful enough to somehow  _incise_   _through_ bone and he  _still missed the heart._ ” Barry’s hands gripped the wood convulsively, gaze now fixed unseeing over the altar.

“A longtidunally oriented stab requires an axial force of over nine hundred Newtons. That’s for an overarm stabbing. For a light handled knife to be embedded three inches deep into the body, clean through both rib and lung, you need a whole lot more. He’d have had to lay her down on the floor and sit on her chest before driving it into her heart with both hands, which at that angle, was not what happened. At that angle, for that depth, you’d need far more than twice the power.”

“When a person sees something bearing down on them, they turn their face away. The knife had to have come down on her from roughly two to two and half feet from her face, giving her enough time to flinch away. But the blood splatter pattern indicated she never had.”

Joe couldnt take it anymore. “Barry, please…”

The boy ignored him and pushed inexorably on, reciting his well-learned catechism of facts. “For her to not have had enough time to turn her face away, at the force of roughly two thousand Newtons wielded by a two hundred pound man the knife should have come down at an acceleration exceeding -”

“People arent physics, Barry!,” Joe burst out in frustration. “They can do things in an adrenaline rush that shouldn’t be possible!”

The kid’s posture suddenly relaxed. “Yes. Again. ‘The heat of the moment’,” said Barry, still with that light, eerie pleasantness. “An unlikely knife and force, an entry point and angle that makes no sense, an unbelievable lack of reflex, a completely unexplainable wound and the "heat of a moment” no one ever saw coming.“

"Unexplained but not impossible,” said Joe gently. “The paring knife was the murder weapon. Your Dad’s prints and Mom’s blood were all over it.”

Barry’s face looked more angelic than ever as he continued gazing thoughtfully at the resigned countenance of Jesus on the cross, the marble head bowed in an eternity of disappointed, weary love.

“Not impossible,” he acquiesced. “Less impossible than a man in a ball of lightning that only a frightened child saw. Less impossible than someone else having broken in, knocked out my father, killed my mother and left without leaving a trace. Less impossible than a fruit knife that can cut through a bone without shattering it or crushing the muscle underneath, clean as butter.”

“What’s your point?,” said Joe, patience too frayed to keep the bite out of his tone.

Barry leaned forward, resting his elbows on the front pew, trailing steepled fingers over his face to rest under his chin. “Tell me, Joe,” he said, “How impossible would it be for me go home today, and become  _so angry_  at Iris that I would push her to the ground. How mad would I have to be to look those eyes I love and plunge a knife into her beating heart, nearly to the hilt, with enough force to break bone? What in this world could she do that would make me do that?”

He could see it all too clearly, his baby’s eyes glassy and vacant, the blood seeping down her chest, the dusky brown skin ash-grey under the blue plastic tarp…

“That’s it,” the sudden chill in his bones burned away as he rounded on Barry furiously, trying to pierce through this terrible, impassive veil and rip out his son who was bleeding underneath. “Don’t think I dont know what you’re trying to do, Barry, but you are not him! You are not your father -”

“But I am his son,” he said calmly, “the son of a murderer who has defended him all his life.”

“You’re my son!” said Joe angrily. “You’re the boy I raised! I know you!”

_“And I knew my father, Joe!”_

He got his wish when the unnatural stillness was shattered with Barry’s shout, a thunder clap in the high enclave. The fury Joe had sensed seething under the surface was finally unleashed, teeth bared and eyes streaming, his face a rictus of wild anger he had never seen on Barry before.

For a strange, unforgivable moment, Joe wondered whether this was the same kind of ferocity that had ended Nora’s life.

“I knew my father! I saw the way he looked at my mother the first decade of my life! The way he held her hand, the way he kissed her hair, the way he  _smiled_  at her - I know what that feels like, because its the same thing I’ve felt in me for Iris since I was ten!”

The tears drowned Barry’s eyes and voice even through his yelling, but he leaned away from Joe when he tried to pull the boy to his chest. “I couldn’t do it, Joe! I could never hurt Iris like that, couldnt ever even  _dream_  of hurting her, there’s nothing in the world that she could ever do that would make me so angry,  _no heat in the world, Joe!_ ”

“I know that,” Joe finally managed to grab him by the elbows, forcing him to look at him. His own vision was blurred with tears now, desperate to get through to Barry, to make him understand how much Joe loved him, trusted him - “Barry, I know that! I know how much you love her - I’ve always known!”

“No, you don’t!,” Barry cried, struggling against him. “You don’t know. Because if you did you’d at least believe I know what love feels like! You’d believe I saw it in my father! You’d know how impossible it is to love someone so much and ever - ever -,”

He crumpled with a suddenness that caught Joe so off-guard that he barely caught him when he fell forward. A keening wail burst from Barry’s throat that he tried to bury too late in Joe’s shoulder, slender frame shuddering and wracked with an anguish still too towering for his young body to contain. Joe could only cradle the back of his boy’s head and wrap his arms around him, as tight as he had when Barry had cried for his parents after Nora’s funeral, holding him as close as when he had found him huddling in the dark, tear-streaked and terrified from his nightmares. He simply held on, anchoring him through the storm, murmuring comfort into his hair.

Gradually, the violence of his sobs subsided. Barry drew away and wiped his eyes, neither of them caring about the wet patch left on Joe’s coat.

“And if I ever - Iris - if that ever -,” he stuttered, determined to finish saying his piece even with his face damp and averted, tremors still running through him, “- I wouldn’t be able to lie, Joe. I wouldnt be able to live with what I had done. I’d…I’d kill myself too. Because, she is… she’s everything to me.”

“I know, son, I know -,” Joe kept up his low, soothing litany.

“Do you really? Do you really understand?” Pleading, desperate, searching eyes pierced into his own. “We can disagree about what things are impossible in this world but not that. That is the only impossible thing I could never become. It’s because I know that to be true… _that’s_ why I don’t doubt my father.”

“A man that’s faster than lightning may be impossible,” Barry slumped against the pew, head bowed low, his face bathed in both tired, resigned grief and the rose-gold of the dying light, “but it’s less impossible than that.”

Joe held onto the boy’s limp hand. “I know,” he said helplessly, “I understand.”

The two of them sat in silence, Joe rubbing the aftershocks from the line of Barry’s back. Eventually as the shadows of the pews lengthened, he stopped shaking, instead leaning listlessly against him, head flopped on Joe’s shoulder, completely worn out and drained. He slid an arm under Barry’s back and helped him up from his seat then, almost carrying him out of the pew and along the aisle, a mess of heavy, hollowed-out limbs. Joe chivvied him outside in front of him and turned around to close the heavy chapel door.

The jeweled light now lay at the feet of the Saviour, His body limp with agony and exhaustion but his face still gentle with love - patient, forgiving, inexhaustible.

_“Barry, look at me. Look at me! Now, Joe’s gonna look after you till I get out of here. You just - be the good boy your Mom and I know you are.”_

_“I love you, son. You hear me? I will always, always love you.”_

**Author's Note:**

> The Speed Force canonically has a cushioning effect that protects the environment around the speedster from G-forces. This allows them to act at high speeds with nothing but a slight displacement of air and no friction or damage to things they touch and use. 
> 
> At the speed which Eobard stabbed Nora, half her chest would have exploded/ been crushed with instantaneous death. But we see only a neat wound with a relatively small amount of blood and she lingers for minutes before dying. The knife seems to have gone through the body as easily as butter, making the ribs irrelevant. Thawne never intended to frame Henry, he simply acted on the rage of being thwarted. I imagine the wound would have been a baffling one, a depth that spoke of incredible force with none of the damage.
> 
> That's my junk science take on it anyway. :P


End file.
